Your contact center’s objective is to have its call successfully reach your customer, right? We know it is difficult to accomplish this when the calls are being blocked or mislabeled.
Today, we bring labeling on the table, leaving call blocking for a future article.
What is labeling?
“Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about (“How’s your family?”). Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack.” Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
Thereby, the first step to labeling is detecting the other person’s emotional state. If you want to define labeling in very simple terms, this is the method by which you give voice to the feelings of others – and here it is well worth mentioning your prospect’s, your client’s, or your partner’s feelings.
As Chriss Voss mentioned in his book, very good forms of labeling can be “It seems like…” “It sounds like…” or “It looks like…”. But let’s see what that looks like in a concrete example, shall we?
Imagine you are on a phone call with the hostess of a very well-seen restaurant in your city. It is also a big holiday, so finding a free table is pretty difficult. Being a busy period, there is enormous pressure on them and finding a free place is not an easy task at all.
Most likely she feels very generous with her time giving you support, so you tell her that you appreciate the fact that she spends her time finding a solution, which will reinforce that positive emotion. The appreciation you show for finding the solution will create the right framework for her to go that extra mile to get you that last free table.
But what do we do about negative emotions?
At the same time, the labeling method can help in case of a situation with negative emotions.
A situation with negative emotions is very likely to force you to use multiple labels to disarm a single negative emotion. But that’s the good part about labels, they can be cumulative!
And if you think there will be a potential negative emotion in the discussion that is going to take place, labeling can help you prevent it.
We also learned from Chriss Voss that if your counterpart doesn’t agree with the label you use, you can easily step back and say something like “I didn’t say that’s it, I just said it seems like that.”
And last but not least, the labeling is about knowing when to be quiet and listen. When using labeling as a response, your conversation partner will usually give a long answer that is just a “yes” or “no”, so that is the right moment to actively listen to him/her.
Conclusion
To sum up, the moment when you use constructions such as “It sounds like…” or “It seems like…”, you relay that you understand the client and you can put yourself in their shoes. You want to make them feel understood so that they can trust you and, therefore, to ensure the right position in the negotiation.
Within RepsMate the labeling process is handled by professionals – psychologists and experts who have studies in specific areas of each AI module for which data are labeled, so that they can understand the reason for a label in a more detailed way.
The labeling process is performed in-house through a platform that allows several types of actions, necessary for labeling more data. These actions are then taken over by the R&D department to train the following AI modules:
- Speech Recognition
- Speaker Recognition
- Emotions Recognition
- Behavioral Segmentation
